One city employee fired, 75 others noncompliant following vaccine, booster mandate

WORCESTER — One city employee has been terminated but no one from the School Department since a vaccine and booster shot mandate was implemented.

As of Wednesday, 1,493 of nearly 1,900 city employees — excluding those with exemptions, on leave and School Department workers — had been fully vaccinated, while 1,071 out of 1,150 eligible for their booster shots had received an additional jab.

"As of 8 a.m. on Feb. 1, 335 employees were not compliant," said William Bagley, director of human resources for the city of Worcester. “By the end of the business day on Feb. 2, only 75 employees remained out of compliance; this number is expected to decline further on Feb. 3 and going forward."

Bagley said that due to some issues including difficulties uploading information to the city's portal, the city took action to work with employees who attempted to meet the deadline, but were unable.

"Many employees may have faced obstacles finding testing or boosters over the weekend as a result of the severe storm that hit the northeast,” he said. "The city set up a booster clinic for employees during the afternoon of Feb. 1 and advised employees of an already scheduled booster clinic on Feb. 2.

"In addition, working with city departments, human resources reached out to employees who had not uploaded information to provide them with assistance with uploading.”

Bagley said that employees who are not vaccinated or boosted have the option to present a negative test on a weekly basis, and that employees who do not choose any of these options will be found noncompliant and unable to work until they become compliant.

"They are required to use vacation time," he said. "To date, the city has terminated one employee for refusing to comply."

Wellesley-based Transformative Healthcare was awarded a contract to manage employee vaccine policy compliance and employee testing tracking for over 7,000 Worcester Public Schools and city employees.

The contract, which was awarded in late December and began in early January, will run for six months until late June and will cost the city $27,500 per month, Bagley said.

"Transformative Healthcare provides vaccine policy and tracking services for the city," he said. "More specifically, Transformative Healthcare verifies employee vaccine and testing documents that are uploaded to the city vaccine and testing portal, perform contract tracing for nonpublic safety employees who test positive, set up COVID-19 testing for essential personnel and employees who have been exposed at work, and send three times daily compliance reporting to department designees."

Bagley said Transformative Healthcare has worked with the city to create "workflow processes to ensure that they can appropriately meet the needs of the city."

Bagley added that the company remains in contact with human resources personnel and "eagerly responds to the city needs. It has been a positive experience."

"We were willing to either use our software, which we've developed a fully comprehensive suite that we call Crowd-Safe or to use the city of Worcester's technology," said Nick Maverick, the senior vice president of business development and marketing at Transformative Healthcare. "Because of data policies, and the nature of how the RFP (request for proposal) was written, and how we were selected, we reused the city of Worcester's technology."

However, he said, "We use the city of Worcester's technologies but we use all of our learnings from those 2 million transactions, tests and vaccination and computation protocols and customer service."

The company has administered over 1.8 million COVID-19 tests and more than 800,000 vaccinations since April 2020 in Massachusetts and New Hampshire, and has used its software to assist the commonwealth with pandemic management and response.

The combination of the city's technology and what the company had learned, will allow Transformative Healthcare to accomplish the verification, testing and contact tracing processes, he said.

"I think it is important that we be able to track vaccinations for most of the city side of Worcester Public Schools," Worcester Mayor Joseph M. Petty said. "The human resources department knew the schools or the city could not handle this, so this will make it easier to verify and police vaccinations and COVID-19 tests."

This article originally appeared on Telegram & Gazette: One city employee fired, 75 others non-compliant following vaccine, booster mandate William Bagley